Sheldon Glashow

Professor Sheldon Glashow has been a professor of physics at Boston University for 30 years. He developed important theories of electromagnetic and nuclear particle interaction while studying at Harvard University. This research laid the groundwork for the next generation of research on quarks and leptons. In 1961, he published a theory extending electroweak unification models, a concept which was later developed further by Abdus Salam and a former high school classmate of Glashow’s, Steven Weinberg. For this work, these three men shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1979.

In 1964, with James Bjorken, Professor Glashow predicted the existence of the charm quark, an important idea in the theory of quarks, and in 1973, with physicist Howard Georgi, he proposed the first grand unified theory. He is among the most outspoken opponents of string theory, which he has called “a new version of medieval theology.” He continues to study problems of the breakdown of electroweak and flavor symmetries as well as the Big Bang, dark matter, and cosmology.